Much work is being done to develop a system which is capable of accurately locating arrhythmogenic foci within the electrical system of the heart. Existing systems with the purpose of mapping the electrical potential distribution throughout the cardiac system maintain relatively low resolutions, and are unable to provide any clinically significant data. Currently, invasive catheter-based systems are used to locate these problematic cardiac foci, which cause arrhythmias like atrial fibrillation. The existing catheter procedures are generally done as a prelude to ablation after the faulty components within the hearts chambers have been located and identified.
While some research has been done in the area of using anatomic imaging methods like CT and MRI in conjunction with external or superficial body surface potential mapping to correlate both cardiac anatomy and electrophysiology, a significant problem facing the development of a device with functionality worthy of a clinical setting lies within the mathematical principles of reconstructing an electromagnetic field source using collected field data after it has been subject to a volume conductor (the human body). Due to the nature of the problem, many different valid mathematical solutions can be reached using the same field data. This leads to the inability of a system to accurately describe the source(s) which produced the resulting field experienced by the sensor arrays. The following proposed system looks to address these issues.